Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
Share this story In 1943, someone at Saunders-Roe looked at the vast, airfield-free emptiness of the Pacific and had a gloriously contrary idea: what if your fighter did not need a runway at all? What if it just landed on the sea? The result was the SR.A/1 — the...
Share this story Picture the pitch meeting. It is 1948, the jet age is barely out of diapers, and someone at the U.S. Navy stands up and says: what if the fighter took off from the ocean? No carrier. No runway. Just a supersonic delta-wing jet, water-skiing into the...
Share this story On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have...
Share this story Somewhere over the Channel, in a slick of oil and cold grey swell, a fighter pilot is treading water and losing the argument with hypothermia. He hears it before he sees it: a slow, clattering drone, an aeroplane that looks less like it is flying and...
Share this story Picture a beer keg with wings. Now bolt a nine-cylinder radial to the front, wedge a nervous pilot in behind it, and paint a red star on the side. Congratulations: you have just imagined the Polikarpov I-16, the stubbiest, twitchiest, most quietly...
Share this story In the late 1930s the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was, briefly, the most modern airliner in the sky: a clean, four-engined monoplane that could cross an ocean without stopping. Within three years the same graceful airframe was ranging far out over the...
Share this story On a grey October afternoon in 1934, the mountains above Lake Garda heard something they would never hear again. A scarlet machine sat low on the water at Desenzano, twin floats trembling, and then its engine spoke — not a drone but a detonating...
Share this story Picture grey water somewhere off the Alaskan coast in April 1924, fog sitting on it like a wet blanket. Four wooden biplanes on pontoons, engines hammering at a frequency that rattles your fillings, wallowing towards a horizon nobody in history has...
Share this story She was small, blonde and twenty-one, and she kept flowers in the cockpit. Not as a joke, not for a photograph — for herself. Somewhere over the churned earth of the Mius Front, in a Yak-1 with a pale lily painted near the nose, Lydia Litvyak...
Share this story Stand near an Antonov An-22 as it runs up its engines and you do not just hear it, you feel it. Four of the most powerful turboprop engines ever built spin eight enormous propellers, each blade sweeping a circle taller than a house, and the sound is a...
Share this story On 21 March 1999, two exhausted men brought a towering silver balloon down onto the Egyptian desert and stepped into the history books. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones had just done what pioneers had tried and failed to do for decades: fly all the...
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